Reduced plans for freelancers / founders?

I love Hubspot in terms of usability and possible options for the future. But currently, I just started my business and obviously don't have the money to pay for the lowest stage of involvement (in my case: Marketing Starter). I saw an option for startups - but I suppose this offer only addresses startups backed by VC. That's not the case for me, so I wondered if there's any other opportunity to start low and increase budget in case of success? Would be lovely...

You are correct about the software for startups only being for those with VC/incubator backing, as far as I know.

The only option to start at a lower cost is to go with the free CRM plus the free versions of the marketing, sales and service tools. These offer a lot of valuable functionality, but you will need some third-party solutions to make it all work like a full-on HubSpot stack.

I will say having worked with many CRM/marketing platforms, Hubspot has pushed the boundary with how low their pricing is. First coming into this arena almost a decade ago, most of the platforms out there were at minimum $2,000+/mo for just marketing automation, not including a CRM or anything else. So the $50/mo price for just the email marketing component is a bargain for a minimal investment.

With that said, if you really need to stretch a few bucks a little further and email is your biggest pain point, you could bundle in Mailchimp's free plan for sending email.